Thoughts on Engaging Users in Social Tagging Systems
Last updated:- Enable subscription to tags and users
- Provide reputation Mechanisms
- Incentivize people to become curators
- Reward firstcomers
Enable subscription to tags and users
Meaning, you can subscribe to a tag or to an user, so as to be notified of relevant activity for that tag or user.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Encourages users to tag, because a) the more they tag, the more likely it is for other users to notice them and b) they will want to tag their resources so as to show up in other people's tag feeds | Possible bad incentives: People may add a ton of unrelated tags (possibly in automated fashion) to their content so that they show up on other people's feeds |
| Fosters tag quality/vocabulary convergence because users will want to select good tags (i.e. tags a lot of people use), which are more likely to be stable tags |
Note: Systems need some sort of tag cleaning and quality ranking to keep feeds relevant and avoid gaming.
Provide reputation Mechanisms
Adding reputation mechanisms (i.e. karma points, etc) is one way to pay users for contributing to the platform.
Stackoverflow provides some good examples:
Tag medals
Other incentives for desirable behaviour such as new powers that get unlocked as you have more reputation.
Incentivize people to become curators
In other words, incentivize people to put effort into tagging content with good tags.
Information is essentially free, but curated, filtered information is very valuable.
Two points above are ways to do this:
Enable Tag Subscription
User Reputation
Reward firstcomers
In other words, reward people who first add a given resource to the system.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Creates incentives for people to add resources to the website quickly (before others). |
May overwhelm the system as people will devise ways of automatically uploading all sorts of content to the web site in the hope they get featured. |